curator: Juliana Mrvová

Larva Run 2 by Andrej Dúbravský presents his three latest series of paintings, which he has been working on since last year, both in New York and Rastislavice. This exhibition also presents his collaboration with fashion designer Michaela Bednárová and ceramic designer Simona Janišová.For the second time he is also cooperating with the dancer and performerLukáš Zahy. Video performances in Andrej’s house in Rastislavice will be part of this exhibition. Over a long period, Dúbravský has been examining and above all living a queer identity in a rural environment, which he and Zahy attempt to explore through dance, symbolically performed in reversed interiors of Andrej’s house, such as a coop or an attic.

Andrej continues to paint rural motifs, adding to idyllic pictures of the countryside a touch of ecological awareness and issues of humans’ relationship to nature. The insatiable larvae may represent consumption and greediness, but at the same time they are native inhabitants of Andrej’s wild garden in its biodiversity. Human faces appear on larvae heads or on fruit, thus creating a surreal combination of the human with the natural, culminating in paintings of ecological catastrophes where young men sitting at the lake, relaxing, observe smoke thundering from chimneys. Andrej paints similar themes on cloth with original designs by Michaela Bednárová and original ceramic objects by Simona Janišová. Andrej contrasts expressive images of larvae and the elegant shape of the ceramics with the sinister names of the most toxic insecticides. The ceramic containers represent the shelf of chemicals which every farmer must have in the shed. The ecological topics are an important aspect of the presented series, but the questions of painting and its form, which has long interested Andrej, are equally important. Andrej opens the psychological aspect of artwork mainly in figurative paintings of lonely men in the foreground of an industrial catastrophe and through personal video recordings of the dancer Lukáš Zahy. Dúbravský will open two more solo exhibitions this spring, one in Rome and one in Berlin. In the autumn of this year he will present his first institutional solo exhibition in the Czech Republic.